I am going on a social media cleanse for 6 months, and as of today I am 45 days in. I am not on Instagram, Snapchat, or Tiktok. The only form of social media I would say that I am on is YouTube, but I do not really count that personally since I am not posting anything to YouTube since I am not just watching my favorite youtubers. I know that people are probably confused because I used to be the biggest advocate for social media. I still think social media can be a good thing, but I realized that it was not healthy for me. I have been and am going through a lot of extremely personal events in my life right now. So I am on a cleanse. I will be back to using social media after six months. This is just what I have learned without having it in my life.
- You are your own worst enemy. I used to look at pictures of myself and hate what I saw. I felt like every roll of fat, every messed up patch of makeup, and every caption that just wasn’t perfect was me. I felt like the pictures I posted were representative of me, so that meant that to me those pictures were who I was. While I am not going to say those pictures were not of me, I just did not know who I wanted to be at the time, so I was extremely insecure and being on social media did not help me to find my worth.
- I had to leave social media to get a better understanding of who I wanted to be. I was chasing other people’s dreams and not my own. Everyone I followed on social media wanted to go hiking, be crazy and live carefree. That’s not who I am, but it was who I was trying to be because I thought that that was what I wanted with my life, or rather, what I thought others wanted me to be. I felt boxed into this extroverted, quirky, and annoying person who others had portrayed me as. When I left social media, that box no longer existed and I realized that I am an introverted book nerd. I love to write because it’s all I have ever wanted to do with my life. I would rather spend 8 hours in the library reading a book than with people.
- Sometimes it’s good to treat your life like an Instagram aesthetic without actually being on Instagram. I told myself that when I left social media, I was going to try and embody a word. This is the same word I tried to embody after being cheated on. These two events pretty much happened at the same time. That word was calm. It was an aesthetic that I turned into my life. I refuse to bring people or drama into my life that is chaos, which actually helped me to develop a stronger sense of who I was and was trying to become.
- Everyone wants you to follow them on social media because they are afraid of actually talking to you. People would rather follow you on social media than have a real conversation with you. I felt so weirded out by the number of times people would offer their social media then when I responded with “you can have my number because I am not on social media. They would just say, “Nevermind. It was so odd to me the first few times it happened, but I realized that I used to follow a person and never talk to them again after. I would like all of their Instagram posts, but I just would not have a conversation with them. I have kind of figured out how to decipher whether people actually want to talk to you again after they meet you based on what social media they ask for. On Snapchat, they want to talk to you, and on Instagram, they just want to stalk you.
These are the few lessons I have learned so far, but I am not even a third of the way through my cleanse, so who knows what other things I am going to learn through this process. I will be sharing all of them though.